


Start of Line

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Series: Assorted Narnia Crossovers and AUs [13]
Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Future, Computers, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, NFE 2014 Madness, Virtual Reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-19 22:43:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2405585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucy looks around, wondering what makes the Professor's workshop so dangerous.  At first glance, she can't see anything special: just a bunch of computers on a rack and a half-dozen monitors scattered about to no apparent plan, each surrounded by drifts of notepaper and graph paper.  But then one monitor switches from its screensaver -- snow falling onto pine trees -- to a black screen with a single line of text.</p><p>Lucy steps closer, curious.</p><p><Hello?> the computer says again.  The cursor blinks in silent invitation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Start of Line

**Author's Note:**

  * For [songsmith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/songsmith/gifts).



> This fic was written for **songsmith** , in response to the prompt: _Alternate Narnias. Maybe reimagine Narnia from the generic-medieval-fantasy to something like steampunk, space opera, or superhero. Maybe parallel universes start meeting and canon!Narnia encounters an alternate!Narnia of some kind._

After three bioterror attacks in the same month, the government decides that children should be evacuated from London and other urban areas. Lucy isn't quite clear why the countryside is supposed to be safer -- it isn't as if anywhere is very far from anywhere else these days, with the speed of modern transport and how crowded England is -- and she doesn't like being told to run and hide. But she packs her bags, kisses Mother and Father goodbye, and follows Peter, Susan, and Edmund to the train station. The evacuation trains would be perfect targets, she thinks, but they rattle out of London to the accompaniment of sirens and deserted streets and arrive in the Lake Country unscathed.

They're staying with a Professor Kirke, who apparently sat on Father's dissertation committee even though they're not in the same fields at all. Lucy thinks he does something very complicated with computers -- more artificial intelligence or predictive analysis than bio-interfaces. But Father says he's a good sort for all that his head's in the clouds, and he's filthy rich from investing in the early internet and owns one of the old stately homes that are mostly museums nowadays, so he's the best choice to house the four of them. The one problem is that the Professor's house _is_ a bit of a museum -- there are tours and all that -- but they're private and small, and they follow the same route at three scheduled times each day, so it's simple enough to keep out of sight.

Besides, the parts the public don't get to see are more interesting. Lucy has always thought jumble rooms are more interesting than showpieces. You can turn rubbish into new and surprising things, but all you can do with a fancy chair or a famous painting is try hard not to break it. And the Professor has astonishing amounts of rubbish: everything from medieval fire irons to Victorian ballgowns to microchips and motherboards.

And then, of course, there are the server room and the Professor's own workshop. Those are always locked, but Lucy likes to sit with her back to the door and listen to the warm, steady hum of electrons calculating the world.

"I should have checked here first. Are you becoming one with the computers again?" Susan asks when she discovers Lucy in the narrow, attic corridor.

"No, I'd have to actually be touching them for that to happen," Lucy says in all seriousness. "Or have implants, but you know that's not allowed until you're all grown up." She sighs. "I can't wait for that. It must be lovely, to write code without your fingers tangling up and slowing everything down."

"You'll be a marvelous cyborg," Susan assures her. "Now up! The Macready won't be pleased if she has to hold supper much longer."

Lucy takes her sister's hands with a smile.

The meal is tense -- Edmund hasn't let go of his resentment over the evacuation, Peter is wound up from being trapped indoors by the rain, and Susan is worn out from stepping between them. Lucy wishes they were still at home, wishes the world were kinder and more logical. She's not even certain who's behind the attacks, or what the terrorists think they want. She checks the news sites every day on her tablet, but it's all what-ifs and maybes.

The real information must be out there somewhere. She just doesn't have the tools to reach it.

The next day it's still raining. Lucy and her family end up in the drawing room, nestled in various couches and chairs and wandering as far away as they can get online. They all have friends to keep up with and commiserate about the evacuation and the uncertainty of when (or if) they'll ever be allowed back home. But people can only sit still for so long -- growing children even less than that. After the one o'clock tour group have left, Peter flicks through the house's webpage and announces, "Nobody's booked for the three o'clock tour. We might as well give ourselves a free look around while we can."

"Boring!" Edmund says, and throws himself sidelong onto a sofa. He kicks his heels against the cushions and adds, "I did the virtual tour already. Who cares about stupid art that doesn't even move."

"I have an idea!" Susan says before Peter can respond. "Let's play hide and seek. I'll be 'it' first, and whoever hides the best will be 'it' for the next round."

"Yes, let's," Lucy agrees, sliding out of her armchair and setting her tablet on the end table. She doesn't especially want to play hide and seek, but it's better than listening to yet another argument, and nothing says she has to stay on the tour route. She'll just go mess around in one of the jumble rooms for a while.

Faced with this united front, their brothers give in, and shortly Susan is alone in the drawing room, counting to a hundred.

Lucy decides to head for the attic. It's chock full of old furniture, as well as more modern castoffs. She'll just settle down behind a dresser or a wardrobe with a pile of broken appliances to take apart.

The door to the attic is at the end of a long, narrow corridor, just past the server room and the Professor's workshop. Lucy pauses, as always, to press her hands against the workshop door and wonder what secrets the Professor keeps locked away.

The door swings inward on silent hinges.

The Professor forgot to lock it.

Lucy bites her lip. She really oughtn't go in. An accidentally unlocked door isn't at all the same as an invitation, and the Professor did tell them his workshop could be dangerous. But she's so terribly curious, and if she's very quick and doesn't touch anything, she should be perfectly safe.

She slips into the workshop, being careful not to let the door latch behind her.

The workshop is a small room, done in dark wood and pale blue wallpaper, with mismatched wooden tables lining three of the walls. The overhead lights are off, but thin gray light slants in through the windows. Rain beats against the glass and the outer wall, its steady thrum a pleasant counterpoint to the background hum of electronics.

Lucy looks around, wondering what makes this place so dangerous. At first glance, she can't see anything special: just a bunch of computers on a rack and a half-dozen monitors scattered about to no apparent plan, each surrounded by drifts of notepaper and graph paper. But then one monitor switches from its screensaver -- snow falling onto pine trees -- to a black screen with a single line of text.

Lucy steps closer, curious.

<Hello?> the computer says again. The cursor blinks in silent invitation.

"Hello to you, too," Lucy says. Father says the Professor has an odd sense of humor. She must have tripped a motion-activated security program, and this is meant to unnerve anyone trying to spy on his work.

She looks around, wondering if she can turn the program off before it alerts the Professor. "Oh, bother. Where are the keyboards? He can't do everything with touchscreens, can he?"

She taps gently on the screen, then pulls her fingers back with a startled breath when new words appear.

<The Professor prefers voice activation,> the computer says, <but I believe there is a keyboard in the secret drawer of the table under this monitor.>

The Professor, Lucy suddenly remembers, might be working on artificial intelligence. She fumbles with the edge of the table until she finds the catch-spring of the hidden drawer and pulls it outward, revealing a slim Dvorak keyboard.

<Hello,> she types. <I've never met a thinking computer before. Please don't tell the Professor about me. He says his workshop isn't safe so I'm not supposed to be here.>

<Of course it isn't safe,> the computer agrees. <Oh, not for you! You're quite all right. But the Professor worries about introducing new variables to his experiments. There have been unfortunate consequences in the past. Programs have been corrupted past repair.>

Guilt settles into Lucy's stomach. She shouldn't have come in. Locked doors are kept locked for good reasons, and now she may have ruined someone who might as well be a human person. <I'm sorry. I hope I haven't hurt you,> she types. <I'll go now. Don't worry about telling the Professor. I'll apologize myself.>

<Wait!> the computer says.

Lucy stops halfway through shutting the drawer.

"Yes?" she says aloud.

<Sometimes new variables are necessary to resolve an unviable simulation,> the computer says. <There is a virus. Will you help?>

"Me?" Lucy asks. "I'm not a programmer. I mean, I know a little, but only very simple things, nothing like artificial intelligence! Shouldn't you ask the Professor?"

<New variables are necessary,> the computer repeats.

Lucy looks over her shoulder toward the door. Susan must be done counting by now, and she's sure the Professor himself will be along sooner or later. But this computer program seems friendly, and she hates to leave people in trouble when she can do something to help.

Besides, this will make an interesting story to tell her friends tonight: Lucy Pevensie, hacker extraordinaire, savior of super-secret AI programs. She's sure she can make it sound like a grand adventure, even if all she does is tap a few keys and maybe unplug a hard drive.

"What do you want me to do?" she asks.

<On the keyboard, type Y when prompted. I will explain the rest from there,> the computer says. The screen clears, then fills with rapid code, lines scrolling past so fast they might as well be gibberish. Lucy stands at the table and waits.

Behind her, a strange, lens-shaped apparatus swings to catch her in its sights. The slight whirr as it moves and powers up is hidden by the fans that kick into life on the computer rack and the relentless thrum of rain.

The scrolling code slows. At the end is a single question, in plain English rather than any programming language: <Enter Narnia Y/N?>

<Y,> Lucy types.

The machine behind her fires, and the world dissolves into white.

When she opens her eyes again, blinking back tears from the overwhelming light, she is standing in an alley between two obsidian skyscrapers, each lit with glowing blue and white conduits that limn their structural joints. The sky overhead is night-black and filled with boiling clouds. The ground at her feet seems to glitter faintly, as if it, too, could flare to light and life at the right signal, and beyond the back wall of the alley she can see other skyscrapers glowing in the night.

Something clicks and scrapes behind her, like suitcase wheels on cobblestones.

Lucy whirls, and stares. She doesn't know what is more alarming: that she's in an alley with a strange man, that the man has hooves instead of feet, that he's wearing a black bodysuit with glowing circuits traced along his torso and limbs, or that he seems to have horns. Which are also glowing.

The horned man, backlit by the faint glow of the city street, extends his hand toward Lucy. "Hello again," he says. "I'm sorry for digitizing you without proper warning, but even Users can only solve some problems from within the system and the Professor refused to return to our world after the Witch broke through his firewalls."

"Users? The Witch?" Lucy asks.

The horned man looks nervously over his shoulder. "You are a User, from outside the system. The Witch also came from outside, but she isn't a User no matter what she claims. She is a virus. But we shouldn't talk about that on the streets," he adds hastily. "Her eyes and ears are everywhere. Will you come with me to meet the Resistance and learn how you can help? If you don't want to stay, we'll send you back, but we can't do that from here."

Lucy bites her lip. Then, slowly, she takes the horned man's hand and shakes, once. "Hello," she says. "I'll come meet your friends, though I won't promise anything more just yet."

The horned man smiles. "Thank you, User. My name is Tumnus." He pulls a stick off his back, touches both ends, and expands it into a deep blue jacket with glowing white seams. "Put this on. It's not much of a disguise, but it will do for the moment."

Lucy slings the stiff, plasticky fabric over her T-shirt and rolls the too-large sleeves up her wrists. Tumnus takes her hand again and leads her down the alley toward the street and its throng of glowing people: no two of them alike and none of them shaped like humans. Lucy wants to stop and stare, but Tumnus tugs her along, skirting the edge of the crowd.

Nobody will look directly at them, but Lucy can feel the suspicious, sidelong glances. The longer she and Tumnus are in the open, the more she wants to escape, to hide. And her own sidelong glances keep catching on limbs that end in jagged blurs of pixels, or patterns of light marred by swathes of glitchy darkness. Tumnus wasn't lying. Something is wrong in this city.

Finally Tumnus guides her into a stairwell under an elevated railway line. They race up two levels -- Tumnus's hooves clatter against the steps, waking echoes that seem far too loud -- and dart immediately into a single-carriage train waiting at the station. The doors and windows light up in soft gold as they close. An arm extends from the roof, latches onto the glowing wire that parallels the tracks, and the carriage glides into motion.

As they pull away from the station, Lucy presses herself to the window, open-mouthed. The city spreads out toward the horizon on every side: bigger than London, bigger than anything she's ever imagined. Brilliant webs of light -- streets and railways and cable cars -- sprawl like circuits between jet-black spikes that rear into the boiling sky.

But the webs are blocked off in strange places. More than half the towers are unlit. And as Lucy turns away from the window to examine the railway carriage, the golden lights flicker and dim for a long, lurching moment.

"Welcome to Narnia, User," Tumnus says. "What do you think?"

"It's beautiful," Lucy says. "But it's broken, isn't it?"

"Yes," says Tumnus. His hand drifts to his side, where Lucy suddenly notices a single blacked-out circle at the end of one glowing circuit.

"Does it hurt?" she asks.

"Yes," Tumnus says again. He lifts his fingers and gives her another smile. This time, though, Lucy can see the strain behind it.

She looks out the window once more, at the beautiful, broken city. She doesn't know what kind of virus could do that much damage. She doesn't know how she could possibly help fight it. She hardly even knows anything about Tumnus, except that he lied by omission to bring her into this strange world.

But she hates seeing people hurt. And this time, she isn't being bundled away to hide. This time somebody wants her to stay.

"My name is Lucy Pevensie," she says. "What can I do to help?"

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, so I went for a _Tron_ fusion. Um. I hope you don't mind? *looks aside, scuffs toes*
> 
> I wanted to do this as a steampunk-esque sucked-into-a-difference-engine conceit, with Uncle Andrew repurposed as a mad engineer instead of a magician, but really, difference engines and analytical engines just didn't have the right kind of computing power. So I went for a ten-minutes-in-the-future alternate universe instead.
> 
> (Some further thoughts on this story and my writing process are available [here on my journal](http://edenfalling.dreamwidth.org/799399.html).)


End file.
